Kenneth Libbrecht
Appearances
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
So he told me that just this past year, like six months ago, he decided to do something about it.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
He really made a name for himself making snowflakes in the lab. Or as he would point out, he actually makes snow crystals.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
I mean, when I say snowflake, do you imagine something that looks sort of like those snowflakes that people cut out of like white folded pieces of paper with scissors? Yes, absolutely, that six-fold symmetry. So that kind of snowflake is really a single ice crystal.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
But a flake can also mean these big puffballs that fall from the sky that are actually many, many tiny snow crystals that have gotten sort of tangled up together. And that's why the Guinness World Record for the largest snowflake really bothered Kenneth Librecht. He says it's got to refer to that kind of puffball, but... When people hear the world's biggest snowflake,
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
He says, like, there's no way you would get a natural snow crystal 15 inches across. Okay, so how big could that crystal get? Well, as I said, you know, he really got famous as someone who could make snow crystals in the lab. And he told me the biggest one he ever made was about an inch across. And he said that one looked pretty crappy. It was kind of falling apart under its own weight.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
But he also goes out and photographs natural snow crystals, like the ones that fall, you know, during a snowstorm. He used to make special trips up to Ontario to this place where the average temperature was about five degrees Fahrenheit, which is really optimal for beautiful snow crystals to form. And that's where he was 20 years ago on December 30th, watching the snow fall.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
They were about five times bigger than the average snow crystal. But even so, they weren't that big. I mean, he got a photo of one that was 10 millimeters across. So 10 millimeters, that's a centimeter. Or for those of you stuck with inches, it's like four tenths of an inch, a little under half an inch.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
All right. How about the longest time spent in full body contact with snow? So that would be 105 minutes and two seconds.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
He says that pretty much all the people who seriously photograph snow crystals, and, like, there aren't that many of them who are willing to go out with microscopes and cameras and, you know, be out there at night in the cold, you know, watching snowflakes fall. He knows them, and no one has come forward to show him anything bigger than that one. Okay.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
So about six months ago, he finally, you know, just got sick of this world record for the biggest snowflake that the Guinness World Record people have. And so he contacted them, and he told them, look— Your big snowflake record from the 19th century is potentially confusing. So why don't you make a new record for the largest individual snow crystal? And here one is. Here it is.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
Plus, in their records, they could sort of cross-reference this new world record for the largest snow crystal with their existing record for the largest snowflake, which would, you know, educate people about what these records actually meant. So that's what they did. They went for it. And the new listing points out that a snowflake is made of many, many individual crystals.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
And it lists that one he took a picture of as the biggest one.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
Yes, it's still there, but added to it is this extra little qualifier about the largest individual snow crystal.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
I put that exact question to a researcher who studies naturally falling snowflakes. Her name is Sandra Uter at the North Carolina State University.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
But she wouldn't flat out say, like, it could never happen. It's impossible.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
Still, okay. Think about this. She's been taking photographs of falling snowflakes for years and she has never seen one that big. She has this special contraption with motion sensors and cameras and like the snow kind of falls through it.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
And each picture is really cool because it shows just like dozens or even hundreds of tiny, tiny snow crystals that are all loosely entangled. So, you know, each individual crystal has its own shape, like you might have needles, like these sort of sharp looking things or little fuzzy balls. And they're all sort of
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
How about the most people making snow angels simultaneously? So that one is 8,962 people who gathered in North Dakota. And then there's the largest snowflake. So the Guinness people say there was a snowflake 15 inches in diameter and 8 inches thick. that fell in Montana in 1887.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
very loosely connected into this three-dimensional complex shape that has this delicate structure. And it's usually, you know, got a lot of like little holes in it and it's elongated and it's kind of flattened, you know. So it's not like a round ball or something. It's really quite weird looking. I mean, I wouldn't think just looking at snowfall that that is what a snowflake looks like.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
But when you see it, you know, sort of like just white against black, kind of frozen in time. It's really pretty cool.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
So she and her colleagues have taken photos of more than 100,000 snowflakes, and the biggest she's ever seen was 35.33 millimeters. Wow. across. So that's like 1.4 inches, like almost an inch and a half.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
Yeah. And they don't have any photographic evidence for that one, remember. That's just somebody's report of what they saw back in 1887.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
You know, I don't know. I mean, again, nothing's impossible. But, you know, the constraints on size have to do with the time that the snow crystals have to kind of glom together before hitting the ground. So, you know, and the amount of snow crystals that are up there, you know, floating around in the storm to potentially collide with each other and get tangled up with each other.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
So let's say a storm is six kilometers high, which is pretty typical. A snow crystal might form at the top and then it starts to fall. It starts to drift down and it's falling at about a meter per second. So it has more than an hour before it hits the ground, you know, but not like infinite time, you know, a couple hours tops.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
And as the snow crystal is falling, the wind is blowing it around and it can get tangled up with other crystals that formed, you know, farther down in the storm. You know, that's why you have all these different shapes is because the crystals are forming in different conditions in the storm. And so that's why, you know, they all look slightly different and they all get mixed up together.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
And, you know, the flake is falling and it's growing and it's growing, but it doesn't have forever to grow. Eventually, it hits the ground. Right. Of course. So, you know, to get a snowflake 15 inches...
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
you would need wind and vapor and temperature conditions that would just be really weird, like weird enough to generate something, you know, like more than 10 times bigger than the biggest snowflake Uter has seen after studying them for years. So I don't know. Again, there's no photographic evidence. Make of it what you will.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
I love snow and I love big snowflakes. The bigger and the puffier, the better.
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The Dubious World's Largest Snowflake Record
I mean, come on, that is a big snowflake. And what I learned is that, you know, first of all, you have to make it clear what you mean by the word snowflake. And I recently talked to a couple of scientists about that. One of them is Kenneth Librecht. He's a physicist at Caltech. And that particular Guinness World Record has always kind of bugged him.